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can't say it better than this In harmony with the views of Albert Camus, a writer with whom he became more and more engrossed in the 1960s, Merton contended that political and military administrators had to learn to be less sane and more skeptical about the institutional ideologies that propelled them. Instead of thinking of religious contemplatives as atypical and narrow in their interests, as society might view them, Merton believed that the solitude of contemplatives gave them a perspectival breadth that enabled them to escape the loneliness and emptiness derived from the fear of death and the need for self-affirmation. The solitary contemplative, detached from the pursuit of social status and the competition for wealth, thus became freed from the collective mirror. By choosing to live in physical poverty, the monk/contemplative chose something that others would ordinarily dread and was thus able to point to the risk of a greater, frequently overlooked poverty of the spirit. |
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As a poet and essayist, Merton frequently addressed this matter as in his 1965 essay, "Rain and the Rhinoceros" included in Raids on the Unspeakable. In that essay he considered the plight of Berenger, the central character in Eugene Ionesco's play, Rhinoceros. In that play Berenger is a solitary human being trapped in a society of rhinoceroses. Without a contemplative dimension, Merton observes, Berenger lacks a fundamental sense of himself as real. The play depicts how social and institutional versions of reality tend to choke out the shy, tentative shoots sent forth by the self. Apart from this benefit to the self, the importance of religious contemplation for society as a whole, Merton felt, was that human beings would find themselves freed from the need to kill and especially without the need to kill in good conscience (Raids 22).
The art of praying, as we grow, is really the art of learning to waste time gracefully—to be simply the clay in the hands of the potter. This may sound easy—too easy to be true—but it is really the most difficult thing we ever learn to do.... This is the real reason why so few of us ever come, in this life, to the full experience of God’s love for us.